


on account of the flesh prevailing over the spirit

by heriotoroopu1



Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Accidental summoning, Alternate Universe - Demons, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Clay | Dream just wanted a sandwich for fuck's sake (Video Blogging RPF), Demon Deals, Demon GeorgeNotFound (Video Blogging RPF), Demon/Human Relationships, Literature Student Clay | Dream (Video Blogging RPF), M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-18 18:35:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29373186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heriotoroopu1/pseuds/heriotoroopu1
Summary: Dream didn’t know what he was signing up for when he was making a sandwich, but he sure wasn’t expecting a demon.
Relationships: Clay | Dream & Sapnap (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream/GeorgeNotFound (Video Blogging RPF)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 21





	on account of the flesh prevailing over the spirit

It was a normal morning. Or so it should have been.

Dream had it all planned out in his head, and he was crossing out each and every item off his mental checklist as soon as he’d kicked himself out of bed, barely missing his cat Patches who’d decided to curl up along the footboard.

 _His first class should have been at eight-thirty, he had an essay due for the next one at ten—  
_ The shower handle squeaked open, the water fell and drummed against his shoulders like a torrential downpour.

_—and by the afternoon, Sapnap’s shift should be over. Twelve, twelve-thirty. Did he mention working an extra hour today? Dream didn’t remember._

Frantically he dried his mop of hair, tufts grouped and brown in the wet conglomeration, and in one swift motion he tossed his towel atop his bedsheets. Hurriedly, he skirted his belt around himself, missed two loops, started over. Dream’s fingers flew. Almost shook.

The next bus after the one which should pull up anytime now would take another thirty minutes.

And it was thirty minutes Dream could have been spending casually walking cross-campus. In contrast to the notion of making a run for his class, further pressured by the ringing of the bell some hundred yards away, making it on time for this bus seemed like a pretty good idea.

_Should he stay the night? Probably not. Sapnap had classes to catch up to._

Dream made a hard swerve into his kitchen. Grabbed a bag of sliced bread from the pantry, then a mustard bottle, and he shut the door as fast as he had opened it, though embellished with an unplanned slam he could have gone without.

He muttered an apology under his breath unthinkingly, and as though he’d appeased it, he turned on his heel, shuffling over to the counter.

This was the part where Dream’s normal day could have gone differently.

He could have gotten out of his way to grab salami from the fridge first before popping the bottle open. He could have made a note to _think_ about how he would have put mustard on his bread—which was a problem, because usually a person shouldn’t need to think about that at all. And this was supposed to be _usually_.

Today was supposed to be _usually_.

 _Usually_ he had to catch the second bus of the day, _usually_ he had a class past eight, _usually_ he’d meet up with Sapnap after lunch and hang for the rest of the afternoon.

 _Usually_ sliced bread didn’t glow bright blue as soon as he’d applied mustard on it, but today happened to be an extremely different day that transcended levels of normalcy, and—Dream thought of it at the last second—perhaps even human comprehension.

Because this was certainly _nothing_ his science textbooks back at home could ever explain.

“What…?” was the smartest thing he could muster, and his voice simply died in his throat.

Tendrils of ghastly blue extended from his mustard, accompanied by rapidly swirling dust and smoke as the bread grew dangerously hotter than any oven Dream had ever used. He quickly let it go, dropping the mustard bottle and bread both, hastily shaking his hand from the steaming burns it had left across his skin. But Dream couldn’t even focus on the pain.

He’d let his fine hand nurse the damaged one by a measly clutch, but his eyes were too preoccupied by the bread, now floating at eye level, glowing blindingly brighter and brighter until it consumed the entire room in pure, unadulterated _white_.

The last glimpse he’d seen of his kitchen, his cupboards had already caught strings of flame, unnaturally growing into one hot whirl of fire until it was all he could breathe in.

The tears gathered in Dream’s eyes, his throat clenched. His thoughts burned to a charred black like his kitchen drawers, he had to get out, but his legs refused to move, his arms refused to sway, there was no escape, no air, no air, no air, no air…!

Dream must have let out a scream from the building tension in his lungs, he must have tried to run half a second too late, but as soon as the world stopped spinning and he’d come to, he was laying supine on the floor, cold wooden boards grazing his skin, Patches suddenly at his side, with her legs tucked beneath a podgy loaf-shaped frame.

_Patches!_

Dream sprang up to a sit, wheezing trying to say her name, but the mottled cat only blinked languidly at him, easing into a yawn as if to say: _Took you long enough_. 

In a panic he scanned his hand—the one that had supposedly burst into flames along with the bread—but it was the same, untouched flesh he had when he woke up this morning. He turned to the cupboards in his periphery next—they were fine. His kitchen was fine.

God, what happened?

Did he just pass out?

As his heart thrummed to life from within his chest, Dream figured he’d have to spare his mom the details of a _second_ faint spell this week. Well, wouldn’t she be simply delighted to know her son started hallucinating about magic bread?

Dream reached out a hand to pet Patches from downright relief, but he’d stopped midway.

White hot pain shot through his bones like electricity, so shocking he’d gathered every inch of his remaining strength trying not to curl into a ball on the floor and writhing like a worm. Dream had never broken any ribs before in his entire life, but he imagined this was how it felt to have every single one of them snap with his full awareness. It was _fire_ , searing fire, incinerating everything from his innards, from his intestines to his lungs, attracting blood to his mouth for him to spit.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he hissed, though his voice was so raspy he failed to recognize it as his own. He screwed his eyes shut so tight he almost hurt himself doing so as well, and behind closed lids all he could see was bright red.

His entire body acted as if it were still stuck—chained, even, from the way his limbs had grown weight with every attempted motion—in some delusional image of a burning room, an actual _Hell’s Kitchen_ , when the ashes from his scorched cupboards fell around him almost delicately like snow, but nothing less foreboding than the quivering of the earth seconds before a volcano eruption.

“I wouldn’t suggest you move so hastily yet,” spoke a new voice. A man’s. Presumably his age. Maybe younger. But his tone was honeyed, silver, menacing and untrustworthy—Dream didn’t know this voice. None of his friends had it, certainly not an English accent either.

A stranger, it should have been. A stranger that shouldn’t be in his apartment in the first place.

He looked up.

Dream was right about a couple things: for one, it _was_ a man about his age, leaning heavily against the dining table, only a few meters shy of standing directly above Dream. A short fringe fell softly over his forehead swept haphazardly to the side, his eyes the same dark cocoa of his hair. His complexion was pale and fair, it nearly reminded Dream of ceramic from the flawlessness of his skin, and it made the pale coral of his lips stand out more than it should in the yolk light pouring through the window.

There was nothing too special about him—not by his generic blue shirt or jeans, or by the crooked grin he donned—save for the fact that Dream 1) did not know him, and 2) did not know how he’d gotten in.

He barely had the strength to get up, let alone throw a punch if needed. Dream was, to the very core as of late, direly defenseless.

His first instinct was to raise his arms up in surrender, regardless of the pain racing up and down from his shoulders to his hands and back—and that was exactly what he had done.

“Look,” Dream began to say in a voice barely distinguishable from a frog croaking, “I don’t know who you are, o-or if you’re robbing me or whatever, but I really hope you understand this isn’t the right way to get by. If you need help, I can offer you money, I can lend you some, I _promise_ , I’ll help you. We can talk and work this out to get you back on track—”

Laughter filled the air between them in an instant, so sharp, almost _harsh_ , it made Dream wince when he cut him off. “See, this is why you humans are so delightfully _interesting!_ Strange man appears in your apartment, you quickly assume it’s a break-in, and the first thing you do is offer them _help_ ,” he derided. He hadn’t bothered to obstruct the smile from reaching his tone when he added, “How cute.”

Dream’s voice could barely make it out of his throat. “You… humans? You say it like—”

_Like you aren’t one._

But Dream couldn’t form the words to make up the rest of his sentence.

At the time it felt like a stupid thing to say.

The stranger shrugged it off and paid it no mind, too, and instead of imploring him to speak more, he took it upon himself to carry on the conversation. “Alright, love, we’re cutting to the chase, I don’t have all day. You know the rules—tell me what you want in exchange for your soul, yadda yadda…”

“My—my _soul_ ,” Dream repeated incredulously. He had half a mind not to catch his head in a hand despite the beginnings of a headache behind his eye—his instincts told him this man would _not_ enjoy that.

“Yes, _your soul_ ,” he replied with a dry undertone. With every passing second the smile he wore tightened all the more. “Surely you know the system if you can make it as far as summon me.”

“Summon you,” Dream said again. He flickered his gaze to the direction of his cat, who’d only returned the look as if to ask: _LOL, you hearin’ this bullshit?_ “S-so you’re telling me… I—I summoned _you_. I don’t even _know_ you.”

A beat passed, two, three. The question flashed across the stranger’s features for a brief moment, but it was gone before Dream could ask again: “Who are you?”

The stranger didn’t answer. He bent over to grab something from the floor, somewhere near Dream’s foot but beyond his vision—when he straightened back up, he was frowning. He held up Dream’s discarded slice of bread, the ruined smear of mustard across the surface and the caught specks of dust in the sickly yellow.

The muscle beneath his right eye twitched.

“Let me get this straight”—he pointed at Dream accusingly with the slopping failure of a pastry and his grin faltered altogether—“you mean to tell me you _summoned me_ with a _sandwich_?”

“Summon you with a sandwich, _what_?” Dream’s brain was pounding from within the containment of his skull. He ran a hand down his face, he began to laugh when the epiphany struck him. “Oh my god, this is a concussion, isn’t it?”

“NO!” boomed the stranger, voice so loud Dream _swore_ the room rumbled. From his periphery Patches hissed and scampered from the vicinity.

He’d thought of looking at her, yelling after her, chasing her to help calm her down, but like Patches, in an instant Dream shot to his legs without effort, without a hint of pain, without even feeling his own body—like he were a flimsy wooden marionette, and his puppeteer prompted him to stand with a single tug on his strings.

Okay.

What was _that_?

“Take this seriously,” the stranger growled before Dream could think about it. His expression contorted into a deeper grimace, so unsettling it left goosebumps across Dream’s skin. “You _dare_ humiliate me? Calling me from the depths of _hell_ by the means of some measly sandwich?” He hurled the sliced bread to the ground, with the vivacity of a gambler losing for the first time, one only a child throwing a tantrum could rival.

“You couldn’t have bothered choosing a more expensive condiment either! Something more worthy of my praise—nothing! Duke John Dudley of Northumberland would have made a much better master—the man knew how to appease with caviar on a platter, now _that_ was brilliant. Very clever! He knew how to sway a demon, but _you…_! Oh!” He rolled his eyes, and tossed a hand to the air in disgust. “You would never harness a horse with reins no matter how hard you tried.”

But Dream had long tuned out of the conversation, and the cogs in his head had just clicked and turned. 

Summon.

Hell. 

Demon. 

Dream had forgotten everything he’d been feeling up until that moment, because every ounce of pain had quickly unfolded and been replaced with a gnawing sense of dread— _fear_. One he’d never felt before. One that was well capable of turning his blood to ice. It didn’t help that he couldn’t move nor feel his own fingers, his own limbs, his own face—his body didn’t even feel like his anymore, if not for it being demoted merely to a vessel of horror.

Dream didn’t know what he was signing up for when he was making a sandwich, but he sure wasn’t expecting a demon.

“This doesn’t make any sense.”

The demon only looked at him wryly with the unspoken words of: _You don’t say._

Dream ran another hand down his face, passively wiping his eyes if in case his strange new companion would disappear once he did. He didn’t. “Look,” he told him in the most casual voice he could draw out of himself, now that it was easier to speak without his entire body ablaze and throbbing in pain, “I just wanted breakfast. This was an accident. I didn’t want to see you o-or—”

“Oh, it was an accident,” the demon drawled disdainfully, “that _helps me_. No better way to embarrass a Prince of Hell by summoning him then _immediately_ sending him back. You’ve got guts, boy.”

Dream didn’t reply for the reason that he was too anxious to say anything.

The demon must have seen the look on his face because his features softened—as soft as a demon’s face could get anyway—and he let out a tired sigh. Dream’s shoulders sagged at its cue, his eyes grew heavier and heavier as soon as the demon started speaking again. “Fine. I’ll run you through it: state your name, we finish the transaction, you offer your soul to me in exchange, and we never speak of this incident again. Understood?”

“Un—”

The room suddenly began to spin, and Dream’s eyes closed entirely. The magic tug on his body vanished like a tethered string, his numbness now gone only to be replaced by the same excruciating pain, if not doubled.

And like a puppet in the abrupt absence of its puppeteer, Dream collapsed to the floor with a loud thud.

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first fic in the fandom, so i thought i'd give the whole dreamon trope a lil twist by giving george the demon role this time. just hitting publish button makes me super anxious haha oh god
> 
> thank you for reading :] let me know what you think in the comments section <33
> 
> i hope you guys enjoyed! and i'll see you next update :]


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